Selfie

Selfie #8

 

Selfie lies between photography and sculp­ture. At its heart is the analysis of the process of self- creation – one of the most fun­damen­tal themes of art and also a basic premise for the con­dition of the post- medial society of today.

Grzeszykow­ska makes a radical turn in the direc­tion of the grotesque, creating star­tling sculp­tural charades using frag­ments of her own body, modeled in pig­skin and exhibited on smooth leather back­grounds. Her selfie takes on an uncanny quality as she creates a self- por­trait out of many parts. She treats cor­poreality, sen­suality and auto-​eroticism with black humor, which trans­forms the aesthetic experience into a strug­gle with basic existen­tial emotions. Her refined com­positions resem­ble the ter­rifying props of a horror film set. As in the clas­sics of this genre, death imitates life, while life – the artist’s hands visible in the photographs – is deadened as she gestures towards these imper­manent sculp­tural objects.

The frag­men­tation of the body, through the sur­real exer­cise of sculp­ting select organs and the use of tight photographic frames, leads to a leveling of the proces­ses of creation and destruc­tion. And those frag­ments of the female body are at the same time actual pieces of an animal’s flesh. Grzeszykow­ska takes apart her own image and manipulates the vision of her body in various ways, citing, for exam­ple, the themes inherent in the work of Alina Szapocz­nikow. She per­sists approaching the radical and jar­ring asser­tion that self- creation is but another, fal­lible means of strug­gling with the mortal nature of the body.

 
 


Selfie #2


Selfie #5


Selfie #6


Selfie #10


Selfie #15


Selfie #18

















Aneta Grzeszykowska
Selfie

2014, pigment ink on cotton paper, 27 x 36 cm, ed. of 3 + 1 A.P